Texas After Violence Project Interview with Ms. Tina Duroy - part one of two

COPYRIGHT 2008 Tina Duroy and the Texas After Violence Project

Watch a selection from this interview.

Date: August 11, 2008

Place: Conroe, Texas

Equipment: Sony mini-HD DV camcorder; Sennheiser external microphone

Recorded on: Sony mini-DV cassettes

Interviewer: Virginia Raymond

Videographer: Gabriel Solis

Transcriber: Gabriel Solis

Proofreader: Virginia Raymond

VIRGINIA RAYMOND: The voice that's speaking now is Virginia Raymond. I am here with Gabriel Solis behind the camera. S-O-L-I-S. Gabriel Solis and Virginia Raymond here at Tina Duroy's home, did I say that right, Duroy?

MS. TINA DUROY: [affirms]

RAYMOND: D-U-R-O-I

MS. TINA DUROY: D-U-R-O-Y, you said "i," didn't you?

RAYMOND: Oh, you spell it again for me.

MS. TINA DUROY: D-U-R-O-Y

[. . . Deleted home address. . .]

MS. TINA DUROY: [affirms]

RAYMOND: Thank you, Tina.

MS. TINA DUROY: You're welcome.

RAYMOND: We're here and we've talked about this before. But just for the record, we are here at the request of Susannah Sheffer whom you already know. Actually, I've never met her but you know her, with Murder Victims Families for Human Rights.

MS. TINA DUROY: Right.

RAYMOND: Do you understand that? And do you understand why she asked us to do this interview?

MS. TINA DUROY: Yes ma'am I do.

RAYMOND: And can you just generally say what that is?

MS. TINA DUROY: I think she's just trying to get both sides of the story about people that's been murdered and their family that's lost them, getting their side. And the people that their family has murdered and our side. And how it creates more victims.

RAYMOND: Okay. And also so we're going to talk about that. Thank you. And we're also going to talk specifically at some point it will come up, of course, about mental illness and about your family's struggles to get James some help. And the relationship of that to tragic outcomes. So she and the M.V.F.H.R. are intending to publish a report that will have information from this interview in it.

MS. TINA DUROY: Right.

RAYMOND: And that's okay with you?

MS. TINA DUROY: Absolutely.

RAYMOND: Okay, thanks. Well, if you wouldn't mind, first tell us about your family. Tell us about yourself and your family.

MS. TINA DUROY: Well, James was my older brother and I was second child, then I have two siblings, brothers that are younger than me. And we grew up with a very loving family. My grandparents were great. We had just a very loving family. We had normal family functions: Easter picnics, family get-togethers, such as, you know. But when we were growing up we started noticing changes in James. He lived with my grandparents and not with my mother and I.

RAYMOND: So, how much older—what year was James born?

MS. TINA DUROY: In '60 and I was born in '63. I just turned 45, and James would've been what, forty-eight this year. He was born on leap year day in February. So he's actually only had what, five birthdays? How many birthdays? I don't know.

RAYMOND: Four, right?

MS. TINA DUROY: Yeah, four or five.

RAYMOND: I mean twelve, or however many he would have had five years ago, I guess. Tell me, we're in Conroe. You grew up in Conroe?

MS. TINA DUROY: We grew up actually by Greenspoint, where the Greenspoint Mall came in is where we actually like when I was in first grade, but we grew up in the Houston vicinity. And then my mother married my stepfather, and we moved to Conroe. That's why I'm in Conroe. And James came here with us and lived with us for a while but he proceeded to have problems so, mental problems.

RAYMOND: How old was he when you—

MS. TINA DUROY: Actually, whenever we started noticing it, there was like little things that we started noticing when he was like eleven. And then when he was fourteen is when it really came out. And then when he was seventeen is when it triggered very bad because something happened to him that triggered his schizophrenia; which they say something traumatic has to happen to make you—to make it trigger, and he was brutally raped at the age of seventeen.

RAYMOND: Do you want to tell us about that? Or do you want to start back—

MS. TINA DUROY: Sure, I mean I'll tell you about it. He was seventeen and I was fourteen. And I didn't know about it, and one of my friends had the newspaper and she told me about it. So I went home crying and it was on the front page of the newspaper that my brother had been picked up hitchhiking [long pause] and he was brutally raped by two men, and he got away and ran to the Police Department.

And then after that, after that happened, he was not the same person. He had had a girlfriend at that time. They were serious. Patricia was her name. They were a serious couple. But when that happened something just triggered, he just change. I think he just became a very paranoid, scared person that somebody was going to hurt him. He did. I mean he was always paranoid of everybody to me. He was.

As a child growing up with him, James and I were very close because he was my big brother, of course, and then I can remember things as children that we did. When we'd go to the river with our family, I'd seen a snake one time and nailed it on the board or when we'd go to the restaurant he'd eat all the packs of butter because he liked it. But I noticed that he was being real different.

Anyway when I found out that he had been raped I went home and asked my mother and she cried and she said it was true that it happened. Well, the men got off. They were not charged of the major charge. They got the lesser charge and they are now bail bondsmen here in Conroe. But anyway my mother was very distraught over that. And after that my brother wanted to buy a gun and kill the man, and everything else. And so we tried to get help for him and put him in a mental hospital. We drove him—he was in a Galveston hospital and we would go see him all the time. But like I said when he turned eighteen and the medical insurance ran out we couldn't afford it.

RAYMOND: What were the things that you said he was a little different, even before this horrible thing happened, when he was a little boy? You said he started acting different.

MS. TINA DUROY: At about eleven maybe he would just like shy away from people, as to where when he was younger he was a very people person, he loved it, I mean everybody loves James. James was everybody's favorite. He was a very sweet, artistic, articulate, I mean he was just very intelligent, very intelligent. And still to the day he died I thought he was very smart. He was very smart. And that's why when they passed the mental ill law that if you were mentally ill they wouldn't execute you, well they based it on I.Q.s. And my brother was not book smart by any means, because he went to the ninth grade. But he could hear something and he could remember it.

RAYMOND: And you said when he was fourteen things got worse? What—

MS. TINA DUROY: Yeah. He just became real reclusive and wanted to be by himself. And started listening to different music like the more of the hard music. And just being real introverted.

RAYMOND: So, this is like ‘74?

MS. TINA DUROY: Yes ma'am.

RAYMOND: Something like that. And do you know if anything had happened or it was—

MS. TINA DUROY: Not until he was seventeen and when the rape happened. I know nothing happened. James was the first grandchild in my family. My grandparents idolized James. They loved him. When my grandfather found out that James murdered somebody he had a stroke. And then my grandmother was like James' mother. So he was very, you know, spoiled. He was. But he was a good kid. But he just started becoming very paranoid. And he was hearing voices, demand hallucinations.

RAYMOND: So he was in Galveston for how long?

MS. TINA DUROY: Which trip?

RAYMOND: Oh, okay. So tell me about the different, there were different—

MS. TINA DUROY: Well there was a mental hospital there that I can remember when he was seventeen. I guess I was thirteen, fourteen. He was there—he tried to commit suicide by drinking liquid bleach. They had gone on an outing at Astroworld, he went out the window, and was gone for three or four weeks we couldn't find him. And I can remember my mother and I going to homeless shelters in Houston looking for him [begins to cry]. At an early age like that I can remember.

RAYMOND: How did you find him?

MS. TINA DUROY: How did we find him? Usually in a way we don't want to find him: with the police department.

RAYMOND: And so this was when he was seventeen. Had you tried to find mental health for him before?

MS. TINA DUROY: Yes.

RAYMOND: What—

MS. TINA DUROY: I mean there are, in our country, there are no mental—there’s Rusk [Rusk State Hospital]. But that's a lot of money, a lot of—I mean it is. To me, if we quit putting so much money into our prison system and put more money into our mental health system, we'd be a lot better off. Our prison system would be a lot less. But we don't.

RAYMOND: So while he was a teenager you were trying to get him help, you and your mother?

MS. TINA DUROY: Even up until the time that he committed the crime that he did, my parents were still—my stepfather and my mother—were getting him help. He was going to M.H.M.R. here in Conroe. They'd get him back regulated on his medications, three days later he’d be out on the street again. He was getting Social Security. But I don't understand how they could expect a man to take his medication and know what he's doing when you have blackouts and you don't know what's going on. And by no means am I saying what my brother did was right, by no means. And I'm sorry. And my family has lived in guilt about it for a long time. I mean I'm not making excuses. I'm not saying my brother was mentally ill and that was his excuse. But if he could have gotten the help that he deserved from this country, or our society, things would've been different. We fought for it. And that's why I think that I'm just—I hope that things change, I do hope things change. I just don't think people understand mental illness until you live with it. You could be book smart, you could read about it all day long, these psychologists, you can read about it all day long. Like I could read about anorexic and I'll never understand it. But until you've lived with it, until you've seen the severity of it, you don't know.

RAYMOND: When you were a teenager and James was—or you were younger and James was having these problems, was he living at your house at that point or at his grandparents?

MS. TINA DUROY: He lived back and forth actually. My grandparents lived in Greenspoint and we lived here in Conroe. And he lived back and forth. And at the time when he was living with us at my parent's house he was a freshman in high school and I was in junior high school and he would do a lot for my friends and I. But he had this big black rug that he hung up and he would isolate himself in his dark hole.

RAYMOND: What kinds of—what was he like when he was himself, when he was doing well?

MS. TINA DUROY: Funny. Always happy. Do anything to help anybody. Laughed. He was a sweetheart. And when he was in one of his manic moods he would look at you and ask crazy questions and laugh at you like, you know, I mean he would just— he would be in fear. People would look at him and be fearful of him when he was actually fearful of them. James never hurt anybody up until this crime. In the police record it says that he committed this crime to go back to jail so he wouldn't hurt anybody or do anything.

RAYMOND: Why do you think he—do you think that's true?

MS. TINA DUROY: Yes. He told me when I got his stay of execution in November, he told me that if he could be put back in the prison population, he would want to stay alive, but living on Death Row he would not. And you don't even want me to begin about the visits, visiting my brother on Death Row. No. Or going to T.C. Jester in Richmond at the psychiatric prison when my brother was there for eating his own feces, and drinking his own urine [begins to cry, long pause].

I mean my brother; he probably didn't have his teeth in [laughs].

The hardest time for me, for me is because nobody else was [inaudible].

The hardest time for me [inaudible] was at the time of the execution. The anticipating your brother dying, how do you do that?

. . .

continue to part two

COPYRIGHT 2008 Tina Duroy and the Texas After Violence Project